


Carefully Beautiful

by KuraraOkumura



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: AU, Alternate Universe, College, M/M, stranger au
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-06-23
Updated: 2015-06-23
Packaged: 2018-04-05 19:12:18
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,359
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4191636
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KuraraOkumura/pseuds/KuraraOkumura
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"You know when you catch someone staring at you, normally that person looks away blushing, goes back to what they were doing, and tries their damnedest not to get caught again. But not this guy. This guy just kept on looking at me."</p><p>Ereri, two-shot, Modern Uni AU. Stranger AU. Feels warning. M/M, smut in the second chapter.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Carefully Beautiful

Chapter 1

* * *

 

I noticed when he first took notice of me. It was a cold winter afternoon, in the Trost Café on the street next to my apartment. I came in and shook the snow off my shoulders and hair, tamped my boots against the mat and then turned back to help Armin and Mikasa in from the cold. I saw him outside, hood slipping and snow gathering in his hair, but he didn't seem to mind. His eyes were fixed on mine. I looked away without thinking much of it, but ten minutes later, after my friends and I had sat down at our usual corner and were laughing at some joke or other, I saw him again, in the corner opposite to us – and staring straight at me.

You know when you catch someone staring at you, normally that person looks away blushing, goes back to what they were doing, and tries their damnedest not to get caught again. But not this guy. This guy just kept on looking at me, staring straight into my eyes as he lifted his steaming coffee cup to his lips by the tips of three fingers and took a burning sip. I wondered for a brief second how he could even _drink_ that – the thing was so hot I could see it fuming from where I was. But I could only think about something else for so long before his eyes – cold, hard steel – brought me back to reality.

I swallowed.

I looked down at my table, cursing myself for being the blushing one, but when I looked back up he was still staring at me, so I tried my best to focus on Armin and Mikasa again. But the conversation we'd been having about our lowly college lives suddenly seemed unnervingly boring.

I didn't look at him after that, but I knew he was still there. I could feel his eyes on me the entire time, even after we'd paid the bill and I'd put my thick coat back on, and even after I'd long left the coffee shop and was trudging along in the snow, going my separate ways with Armin and Mikasa, I could still feel his eyes on me.

For some reason, I didn't panic. Normally, in this situation, people give frantic looks behind them to see if they see anyone, then start walking faster and eventually break into a run screaming. But I wasn't your regular person either. I knew how to defend myself – a life born and raised in the suburbs at the hands of fifty local rivalling gangs does that to you. As such, I wasn't afraid of what he might have wanted to try. In all my nineteen years, I'd found few people able to overpower me, and even then they didn't do so easily. And even if I hadn't had that assurance on my side, I just had this feeling – gut instinct, really – that told me that the guy wasn't looking for a fight.

He'd had that feral look to him alright. Those eyes could cut better than any blade. And the bags under his eyes told me he could have used a good night's sleep, which made me wonder what he usually spent his nights doing. He was small, but not weak – nobody physically weak could ever have that constant look of provocation, of threat, in his eyes and survive to tell of it. People who provoked others had it coming for them – that was something else I'd learnt. I suppose I had that same look in my eyes, more or less – Mikasa had often complained that I was nearly always the one getting them into trouble. But that might have had something to do with my big mouth…

Nonetheless, I wasn't about to run and hide. I never had before, and what was there to make me start now?

I saw him every day after that. In Trost Café only at first, but then he began to make appearances in an increasing number of my usual places; the local park, the Shiganshina Cafeteria, the university campus… I saw him more and more, and though he still appeared to be spending his time staring at me, I tried not to let it get to me. I wasn't frightened or freaked out; no, that wasn't my type. It was more like I was angry that he'd invaded my privacy like that. He seemed to know all my favourite places, the times at which I would show up this way or that, and sometimes when I walked home from classes I would get that same feeling of being observed… It was infuriating.

I never talked about him even once to Armin or Mikasa. Mikasa would probably have tailed the guy to high Heavens and slashed his throat for 'frightening her poor Eren', while Armin would have sat me down to talk through every possibility of me knowing or not knowing that guy. But that wasn't what I wanted to do. I think, in a way, I wanted to know what he was going to do. What it was he wanted from me. I'd grown used to catching sight of him from the corner of my eye, here sitting at a swing with children, here at his now-usual table in Trost Café, or tailing me in a crowded street. He was good at it, too, I might add. But the thing was that after a time, as much as _he_ was watching me, getting to know me, _I_ was also watching _him_. Unbeknownst to me, he'd become a part of my routine, and after a few months of this, my day didn't feel complete if I hadn't caught sight of him at least once during the day.

After a time my anger faded to curiosity, and my curiosity to interest. I watched him in earnest now, staring back at him when I caught his eyes, no longer blushing when our gazes met. I was never sure who broke our staring contests, but I do know that when I looked at him and he looked at me, I had a small half-smile on my face that had often raised questions from Armin. I was, in earnest, finding that he was just as desirable a mystery to me as I must have been to him.

I tried to approach him a few times. Only once or twice, for I felt that actually getting to talk to him would break the carefully fragile bond we'd somehow built between ourselves. But every time I made a step towards him, even under the pretence of marching to the ice cream van beside where he was seated at a table or at a bench, he disappeared. He knew I was watching him, and he acknowledged that just as easily as I had first acknowledged the fact that _he_ was watching _me_. But he did not want me to get close to him. Whether that was from fear, apprehension, a simple disinterest, or something else, I did not know.

Then, one day, he simply stopped appearing.

It was the middle of spring, and our little dance had been on-going for at least six months now. My day went about as usual; college, Trost Café, park, home. I knew that something was off. I felt twitchy and on edge all day. My eyes were drawn to every dark corner, every unusual shadow that I deemed of the appropriate size to belong to the one I was so desperately looking for. I snapped at those who spoke to me, grit my teeth and tightened my fists and resisted the urge to pounce on everyone I knew. The number of times that I had not seen him for a day had happened rarely enough that I could count them on the fingers of one hand, and even then he always came back the next day, looking for more, extra present as though to excuse himself of his absence the previous day. But this time felt different. And I was right.

It _was_ different.

He didn't come the next day, or the next, or the next. I didn't see him, _couldn't_ see him, no matter how hard I looked or how unpleasant a person I was to those who tried to understand my mood.

With him gone, my routine was broken. He had never been a part of my life. Hell, I had never even known his name! I didn't know any of the things he knew about me; his habits, the way he liked his coffee, his best friends, his status in life—

It infuriated me. That this man, this stranger, could have this much effect, this much influence on my life—I hated it, hated him for it. All at once, on the day he stopped coming, my anger returned and consumed me once more. I was insatiable.

Then before I knew it it was winter again, and I was trudging home in the snow and the cold with my hood on my shoulders and the snow gathering in my hair, and on some kind of faraway instinct I stopped, and looked up, and I didn't have to look far.

There he was. Still fucking perfect and immoveable. His hood was up this time, and it hid his face, but I would have recognised him anywhere.

He stood with his feet slightly apart, one of them raised as though he'd been in the middle of a step. That was how I knew he'd seen me, too. With the fact that he was just standing there, hands in his pockets, completely immobile and with his foot half-raised to take a forever-unfinished step. We'd noticed each other at the exact same time. There was a cape on his shoulders, a piece of dark cloth that fluttered around his thin waist and hips like wings, and when his raised foot dropped slowly to the snow-covered ground I suddenly remembered to breathe.

I inhaled.

For a long time neither of us moved. We stood fifty feet apart, barely just silhouettes in the white backgrounds, snow whirling around us with the wind and our eyes fixed nowhere and everywhere at the same time.

I didn't know what to do. I had no idea what the hell I was supposed to do with him. He'd been gone for six months, and hadn't I been angry at him for leaving me? But my anger was gone now, disappearing just as suddenly as _he_ had half a year ago… Half a year… So many things had happened in that time. And I suddenly didn't care that I didn't even know his name, I wanted to tell him about everything he had missed. All the things he should have known about me now but didn't because he'd been gone all this time. He'd tell me where he'd been later. Didn't we have another six months to go before he left again?

Without a word, without a sign, I took a few more steps to my left, stopping in front of my door and taking out a key to stick it into the lock. I fumbled awkwardly with my gloves for a minute before managing; it clicked and swung open. I shoved my set of keys back into my coat pocket with the gloves I'd just taken off, and stepped inside; I left the door open behind me – hoping he'd take the hint.

I stomped my boots on my doormat, just like I remembered doing twelve months ago at the Trost Café where we'd first noticed each other. I crossed the long hallway lined with the doors of each of my classmates' apartments, and stopped on coming to one of the last few. I waited for a few seconds, fishing my set of keys back from my coat and looking for the correct one, listening until I heard him shut the door behind him, until he'd seen what door I was standing at, then I unlocked it and stepped inside, again leaving the door open for him to come in after me. The first room I came into was the living room, with a sofa, a low table and a TV; the second, a small kitchen; the third, a bathroom; and the last, the only bedroom.

I stepped into the kitchen after throwing my coat on the back of the sofa carelessly. I made myself coffee, hesitating before fixing him a cup too. I heard him when he stepped inside; heard his light footsteps, the way he shut the door oh-so-quietly behind him, his breathing, and when he pulled off his cape and coat and laid them beside mine on the back of the sofa. I didn't realize I'd been focusing on it until the cup in front of me began overflowing with the coffee I was pouring into it. I gave a quiet "Fuck," placing down the coffee pot and cleaning up the mess, leaving the dirty cup in the sink to wash later. I made another one, then took a deep breath and stepped into the living room.

He was sitting on the arm of the couch, one foot propped up against it and the other flat against the ground. He wore a black jumper, and underneath it a white button-up shirt, and below the waist a clean, neatly ironed set of grey pants. I wondered how his clothes didn't even look rumpled or wet from the snow and frost. Only his shoes, knee-high black boots with a slight heel, looked the tiniest bit scuffed. His clothes made him look thin, but what I could see of his neck sticking out from the jumper and shirt told me he wasn't all that thin; he only looked it. He had short jet-black hair shaved in the back, bangs framing his pale face like an angel's wings.

He looked at me when I came in, and if I'd thought he was perfect before, his eyes took all words away from me.

"Hi," I said. I didn't know what else to say; the cup in my hand all but forgotten.

He smiled. "Hey… _Eren_."


End file.
